The thing about your first product…
You have an awesome idea, and now you “just need someone to build it.”
You’ve spent weeks prototyping what this product could be on paper, on keynote/powerpoint, or a wire-framing tool. You’ve thought through every little detail, and this idea is rock solid. You’re ready to hear a price and invest in this.
Your idea is a social network for pets… (example purposes only, bear with me on this one)
You’ve set aside 10K to build the product.
You’re in a major metropolitan area (in the U.S.) and you go to 3 dev shops for quotes.
Shop 1:
Your friend’s mom knows this programmer kid…, I’ll do it in 3 months for 15K, with no specifics on hours.
Shop 2:
500 hours at 100$/hr, 4 months timeline, $50,000 in total
Shop 3:
1200 hours at 150$/hr, 6 months timeline, with a 3 month guarantee for bugs found in the system, $180,000 in total
So the decision here is easy, right? You go and pressure the programmer kid into settling at 10K, since that was your budget, and you promise to cut out some of the scope. I mean, 10K IS a lot of money, right?
“Those two other shops must be crazy if they think I’m going to pay that much!”
6 months later (not 3 months, like that programmer kid promised), you’ve spent 10K, and you have a registration process that sort of works. Hell, you can even sign in with facebook! Beyond that, the app doesn’t do very much and you can’t even register on Internet Explorer.
You’re afraid to show this off to investors, or even your friends.
Lesson learned. Good.
If you’re in the category of first-time entrepreneurs who want their product to look and feel just like facebook, twitter, instagram, or google (this includes all of the first time entrepreneurs out there), you have to understand what the talent behind this caliber of product is really expensive. if you want the same, you have to be ready to pay the same or figure out some other way to incentivize that level of talent.
The products you know and love probably took millions of hours to make, and billions of dollars to develop (for the big ones at least).
Spoiler: Shop 3 was probably most realistic, because they know changes will come and you don’t have everything figured out just yet. That, and their margins are probably high enough to afford taking some of the hit on themselves in case something goes wrong. If your product ever grows into something real, you’ll a lot more on design and dev down the line.
So I should forget about ever building a product?
No, that’s not the lesson here. The lesson is that really good technology is really expensive and difficult to create and the general public has trouble understanding that until they go through the process of trying to build a product.
We all expect a great idea means a great product means a great product-market fit means a great company. No.
No, a great product is built on the same foundations that build a great company: A group of really smart, passionate people working away at a problem that needs solving.
You either need to become one of those really smart, passionate people or be able to afford a group of them.
Suggestions:
(1) Learn to wireframe REALLY well. This is where intangible becomes tangible, and so it’s really important to get this part of the process down right. I pair wireframes with primary and secondary purposes, so that designers and devs are on the same page with what the intent really is.
(2) Find a really good developer (friend or friend of a friend) and take them out to lunch. The intent here should not be to hire them, but to learn a bit more about who they are as people and what makes them tick. They’re most likely quite different from you.
(3) Do (2) with a really good designer, marketer, strategist, product manager and/or individual who has actually created a product that has made any money. There are more people that can be involved, but this is the core. Whether you hire this type of talent as contractors, full times, or work with them on a founding team - you can’t benefit enough from learning as much as possible about them.
(4) Try outsourcing on a small budget project (ex: a landing page). The rates with outsourcing can be much lower than local shops - but few outsourced shops are all that great, and even fewer individuals can manage the great shops effectively. You’ll probably pay a lot more for school to learn the kind of stuff you’ll learn from trying and/or failing here.
(5) Don’t be afraid to fail. There’s no better way to learn.